I Am A Strong Believer In The

When I'm Really Plugged In I Find It Difficult To Write. It's Like Digging A Well. If You Make A Void, Something Moves In To Fill It. Writing Books Is Like That. It's Mostly About Freeing Up Time, Doing Nothing, And In That Time Some Writing Starts To Happen. We Need To Figure Out How To Maintain Those Voids.

We Keep The Negative Stuff Because It's The Negative Stuff That's Going To, You Know, Potentially Kill Us. That Fin In The Water - Maybe It Is A Shark. That Yellow Thing Behind The Tree - Maybe It Is A Lion. You Need To Be Scared.

Like Many Of My Friends In The Pakistani Diaspora - And Many Of My Friends In Pakistan Itself, For That Matter - I Have Sometimes Looked At The Country Of My Birth And Wondered Whether Its Future Will Be One Of Steady And Sad Decline.

Islamophobia, In All Its Guises, Seeks To Minimise The Importance Of The Individual And Maximise The Importance Of The Group. Yet Our Instinctive Stance Ought To Be One Of Suspicion Towards Such Endeavours. For Individuals Are Undeniably Real. Groups, On The Other Hand, Are Assertions Of Opinion.

America's Strength Has Made It A Sort Of Gulliver In World Affairs: By Wiggling Its Toes It Can, Often Inadvertently, Break The Arm Of A Lilliputian.